Lance Stroll doesn’t tend to romanticise Formula 1, but on the eve of his home race he’s allowed himself a little wistfulness — and, pointedly, he’s attached a name to it.
Asked what his “perfect” F1 car looks like, Stroll delivered something close to a designer’s brief: strong mechanical grip in the slow stuff, proper aero support in the quick corners, a light car that changes direction sharply, a front end that answers immediately, and a rear that doesn’t melt away the moment you hit the brakes. “A car that follows its nose,” as he put it. And when it came time to pick an example, he didn’t reach for a generic “anyone’s title car will do” answer. He went straight to Adrian Newey’s Red Bulls from Sebastian Vettel’s championship run — and finished with the punchline Aston Martin rather likes right now: “So we’ve got the right person for the job.”
The line lands with extra weight because Aston Martin’s opening to 2026 has been bruising. Four races in and the team still hasn’t scored a point. Australia, China, Japan and Miami have passed with the kind of low-profile running that makes even midfield anonymity feel aspirational. In Miami, they at least managed their first two-car finish of the year — Fernando Alonso 15th, Stroll 17th — which says everything about the depth of the hole.
The early narrative has centred on Honda’s new-era power unit and a vibration issue that blighted the opening rounds. Alonso reported a “significant” improvement last time out after Honda introduced what it described as countermeasures, and the manufacturer has now struck a cautiously upbeat tone heading into Montreal. Shinatro Orihara, Honda’s trackside general manager and chief engineer, said the Miami weekend was used to confirm battery vibration improvements and overall reliability — and, crucially, to start understanding the realities of energy management under the revised 2026 regulations.
Canada, Orihara says, is where Honda wants to turn that into something the drivers can actually lean on.
“In Montreal, which is Lance’s home race, we will focus on enhancing the driveability and our energy management strategy to support the drivers in building more confidence,” he said. “If we can give more confidence to the drivers in entering the corners faster and carrying more speed, then we unlock lap time.”
That’s a very modern 2026 problem statement: the lap time isn’t just “more power” or “more downforce”, it’s how cleanly the car and power unit let the driver access what’s already there — braking confidence, throttle pickup, and whether the energy deployment feels like a tool or a trap.
And yet, intriguingly, Alonso’s priority list after Miami didn’t start with the Honda unit at all. He pointed at the gearbox.
“Honestly, the gearbox [was more problematic] the whole weekend than the engine,” Alonso said. “It was very weird on the downshifts and the upshifts, so not very well in control. That’s the number one fix for Canada. I think with all these heavy braking in Canada, we need to improve the gearbox behaviour.”
It’s an awkward warning to carry into a weekend built around stop-start brutality: big braking events, traction zones that punish any hesitation, and kerb interactions that can make a marginal driveline feel outright unruly. Aston Martin is producing its own gearbox for the first time this season after ending its partnership with Mercedes, and while it’s not clear what refinements — if any — have been made for Montreal, the timing is hardly ideal.
All of which forms the backdrop to Stroll’s Newey endorsement. Because while it’s a flattering quote on the surface, it also reads as a subtle plea for a car with a clearer identity — something that behaves consistently, gives predictable cues, and lets a driver attack rather than negotiate. In other words: the opposite of what Aston Martin has been doing so far.
Newey’s presence, of course, is one of the most loaded storylines in the paddock right now. Despite being Aston Martin’s team principal, he’s never pretended that the job title is his natural habitat. Earlier in the season he admitted the role was proving “a little bit” distracting from the design work that made him the defining technical figure of the modern era. The expectation remains that he’ll step back from day-to-day team leadership in due course, with Jonathan Wheatley — recently confirmed as leaving Audi — widely expected to take over.
If that handover happens, it’s not just an org-chart shuffle. It’s Aston Martin acknowledging that it hired Newey to shape cars, not to sit in meetings about everything else. In a season where the team’s new Honda partnership is still finding its feet, the logic is obvious: free up the one person in the building whose influence can genuinely bend the trajectory of a rules cycle.
There’s another layer here too. Honda is expected to be among the first manufacturers to qualify for the FIA’s ADUO (Additional Development and Upgrade Opportunities) safety-net scheme designed to help struggling engine makers under the 2026 rules. The FIA will notify the first eligible manufacturers after the Canadian Grand Prix, with upgrades then permitted ahead of the next race in Monaco. If Honda is on that list, it creates an unusual mid-season lever — not a magic wand, but a route to accelerate fixes and performance steps when rivals are more constrained.
So Montreal matters, even if the points still look like a stretch. Not because Aston Martin suddenly expects to vault up the order, but because this weekend should tell us whether Miami’s “improvement” was a genuine turn in drivability and reliability — or merely the removal of one problem exposing a few others.
For Stroll, there’s also the personal pressure that comes with a home race when the car isn’t up to it. Saying Newey is “the right person for the job” is both faith and expectation. It’s also a reminder that Aston Martin’s big bet on star power — Newey on the pit wall, Honda in the back, Alonso’s experience up front — was supposed to create momentum, not an early-season grind.
Canada is rarely kind to cars that aren’t well-mannered under braking. If Aston Martin arrives with a gearbox still fighting its drivers and an energy package that demands compromise, it’ll be another long afternoon. But if the team can give Stroll and Alonso what Honda keeps circling back to — confidence — then at least this season might finally start moving in a direction that makes the “dream car” talk sound less like nostalgia and more like a plan.
